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These figures are based on visits to Search Engines for the 4 weeks ending 19/06/2010.

This continues to highlight the importance of getting your website to appear high in the Google results. To find out how Solent Systems can help you to improve your website’s search engine rankings then fill out the form on the right to request a call-back.

This function is declared by the template WCF Service in Visual Studio 2010.  It accepts a ‘CompositeType’ object as the parameter, which is itself defined within the webservice.  This object has two properties, a bool called ‘boolValue’, and a string called ‘stringValue’.

To pass a parameter from PHP, a similar class has to be defined within the PHP as well.

(Ensure that the array key is exactly the same as the expected parameter name declared in the webservice.)

There are 2 approaches that can be taken to achieve this in a matter of minutes:

1. Office Data Connection
   1. On the Data tab, select ‘From Other Sources’>’From SQL Server’. You will see a prompt to connect to the database, where you must enter the SQL Server hostname and login credentials. The next window will ask which database to connect to. At this point, you can click ‘Finish’ to end the process of creating your database connection.
   2. The next step is to select the data that you want to pull through into Excel. On the Data tab, select ‘Existing Connections’, and open the connection that you have just created. Click on the ‘Properties…’ button, and select the ‘Definition’ tab. Choose ‘SQL’ from the ‘Command Type:’ dropdown, and write your SQL query in the ‘Command Text:’ field. Click OK to end.
   3. Your data will be taken from the database and displayed as a table in your Excel spreadsheet.
2. Microsoft Query
   1. This solution requires a System DSN, which is created using the interface in Control Panel>Administrative Tools>Data Sources (ODBC). We recommend that your DSN is created using a read-only account.
   2. On the Data tab, select ‘From Other Sources’>’From Microsoft Query’. Select the DSN that you have setup to connect to the correct database.
   3. You will now step through a series of stages to create your query. If you prefer you can skip to the last screen, and select ‘View data or edit query in Microsoft Query’, where you will be able to use the visual interface to generate your SQL query.
   4. To send the results back to Excel, click ‘File’>’Return Data to Microsoft Office Excel’.
      To make the query even more useful, you can also pass parameters from Excel to your query. This builds a level of user interaction into the dataset, and enables report customisation within a matter of seconds.

When connecting Excel 2007 to a SQL Server database, the ‘Parameters…’ button remains disabled and greyed out, until at least one parameter has been included in your query. To include the first parameter within the query, and therefore activate the ‘Parameters…’ button, within Query Manager type your user prompt surrounded by square brackets, for example ’[Please enter the start value of the desired range]‘.

Now, from the Data tab, select ‘Connections’ and choose ‘Properties…’ for the connection that you want to make customisable. Go to the ‘Definition’ tab and now you will see that the ‘Parameters…’ button has been activated. Click this button to modify how the parameter is populated. There are 3 options here:

1. Prompt the user with a popup window
2. Use a static value
3. Use the contents of another Excel cell

Option 3 enables an Excel user to customise the report without any knowledge of databases or SQL, just the ability to update the contents of an Excel cell.

This is a really nifty method to allow users on your network to safely access your data. If you have used a read-only DSN there is no risk of a user successfully performing something malicious – DROP DATABASE database_name!

Only a disconnected recordset is able to be passed around in your code and handled later.

The dataset contained information on just over 36million search queries, and 19million click-throughs.  The data reinforces the importance of the first position on a search engine results page (SERP), with 42.4% of all click-throughs.

The first 10 positions account for 89.9% of all the click-throughs, which means that if you don’t appear on the first page of the results, you shouldn’t expect large volumes of visitors clicking through to your website, unless the search term is extremely popular.

This knowledge enables website owners to decide what level of investment in Search Engine Optimisation is worthwhile.  An increase in their Search Engine index can be roughly translated into the number of additional visitors this is likely to produce.

These figures are based on visits to Search Engines for the week ending 13/03/2010.

This continues to highlight the importance that your website should appear high in the Google results.  To find out how Solent Systems can help you to improve your website’s search engine rankings then fill out the form on the right to request a call-back.

Normative ethics is the branch of ethics which investigates questions in the area of ‘how ought one act, morally speaking?’.

There are 3 main normative ethical theories, which we can apply to our SEO strategy to measure whether a particular approach can be considered ‘ethical’.

1. Virtue ethics which focuses on the character of a person, rather than their actions.
   • An ethical action is one that is considerate of the welfare of everyone, showing respect and compassion for all, promoting community.
   • An ethical action is one that is consistent with virtues that develop humanity; honesty, integrity, fairness, truth, etc.
2. Deontology argues that actions and decisions should be made considering one’s duties and others’ rights.
   • An ethical action is one that treats others fairly.
   • An ethical action is one that best protects the moral rights and dignity of those affected (searchers, search engines, site owners and their employees, and Web users in general).
3. Consequentialism (Teleology) argues that the ethics of an action are linked to that action’s result, or outcome.
   • An ethical action is one that provides the most good, or does the least harm.

We briefly mentioned the parties who can be affected by ethical/unethical Search Engine Optimisation practices, as we must know in order to consider their welfare, rights, equality, etc.

• Searches will benefit from ethical SEO strategy as search results will best matched to their queries.
• Search engines will benefit from ethical SEO stategy as relevant search results will help them to become more highly trusted by the searches, who will return to use the same search engine on other occasions.
• Site owners and their employees (including SEO agents) will benefit from ethical SEO strategy as they will attract relevant traffic to their website, hopefully converting a search into something meaningful to their website’s aim.
• Web users in general will benefit from ethical SEO strategy as relevant and trustworthy websites and search engine results will help to develop the structure and usability of the Web.

The SEO action that does most good, and least harm, that protects the rights of  those affected, that treats others fairly and promotes community, and that helps to develop humanity is the one that recognises why a website is not performing optimally in search engine results, fixes the problem by improving the website’s design and functionality, the search results and the Web in general.

The SEO action that does least good, and most harm, that fails to protect the rights of those affected, that ignores the equality of others, ignores community, and doesn’t demonstrate any characteristics that develop humanity is the one that uses deception to achieve search engine rankings that aren’t warranted.  This type of action cannot improve the website, makes search engine results less relevant and therefore degrades the entire Web in general.

Solent Systems only uses ethical SEO techniques, and never knowlingly breaches any laws, or guidelines set down by the search engines.  In a later post we will discuss some of the ethical and unethical techniques of SEO.

1. Download plugin and unzip.
2. Upload the plugin file to your WordPress plugins directory inside of wp-content.
3. Activate it from the plugins menu inside of WordPress.
4. Type ‘[ word_count ]‘ in a page or post to display the plugin (without the spaces).

Enter some text in the plugin field and this SEO tool will let you know how many words are in the string.

This simple SEO tool gives some brief, but very effective, advice for when you’re creating a brief description of your website.

This tool has been created for the reason that when submitting your URL to directories there is often a strict character or word limit.

1. Download plugin and unzip.
2. Upload the plugin file to your WordPress plugins directory inside of wp-content.
3. Activate it from the plugins menu inside of WordPress. 
4. Type ‘[ string_length ]‘ in a page or post to display the plugin (without the spaces).

Enter some text in the plugin field and this SEO tool will let you know how many characters are in the string.

Try not to exceed these string lengths when coding a website:

• Keywords – 200
• Description – 250
• Title – 90 (Google trims the title tag to 63).

This simple SEO tool gives some brief, but very effective, advice when writing text for your meta data tags.